After the UCC, West Bengal's next law will test where "land jihad" meet the Constitution

West Bengal's UCC heads to the Assembly next, but Adhikari has already flagged a conversion law and a land sales law to follow, both undrafted, both tied to older BJP narratives ("love jihad," "land jihad"). Neither has specified religious classification yet. Legally, both would face Article 14 and 25 scrutiny once drafted.

By Mahima Katal New Delhi, Aug 12: With the Uniform Civil Code headed to the West Bengal Assembly this Session, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has already named what comes next, a law against forced religious conversion and a law restricting land sales. Neither exists in drafted form yet, but neither is arriving without a history. The conversion law sits inside a narrative the BJP has run for over a decade under the banner of "love jihad." The land law draws on a newer but equally familiar frame, "land jihad," first deployed at scale in Assam and Uttar Pradesh and now extended to Bengal's border districts. Understanding what these laws are likely to do requires separating the narrative from the legal architecture that would eventually have to support it.

Adhikari's own language at the Bankura meeting where he announced these plans was telling in what it left unresolved. He did not say whether the land law would apply uniformly or specifically restrict transactions between members of different religious communities. That ambiguity is not a minor omission, it is the entire legal question.

A land-use law that applies evenly, regulating agricultural conversion or absentee ownership regardless of the buyer's religion, sits on comfortable constitutional ground. A law that classifies transactions by religion, even through ostensibly neutral mechanisms like residency requirements or designated "protected zones," invites direct scrutiny under Article 14. Courts have consistently required a demonstrable, non-arbitrary rational nexus between any such classification and a legitimate state purpose. Simply invoking "land jihad", a term with no statutory definition and no state-published data behind it in West Bengal so far, would not clear that bar on its own.

The conversion law faces a parallel test. Anti-conversion statutes in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and other states have drawn on the state's public-order powers under the State List, but they collide directly with Article 25's guarantee of the right to propagate religion. That collision has not resolved cleanly anywhere it has been tried; it has instead produced years of continuous litigation, with courts repeatedly asked to weigh state interest in preventing coercive conversion against an individual's constitutionally protected freedom of conscience and religious practice. West Bengal's eventual statute, whenever it surfaces, will not be exempt from that same scrutiny merely because it arrives under the same legislative umbrella as the UCC.

To its credit, the government has offered a consistent public justification for all three measures. The UCC is framed as gender-neutral reform, with tribal exemptions preserved — a framing that mirrors, at least rhetorically, the approach taken in Uttarakhand and Gujarat. The conversion and land laws are framed not as communal measures but as responses to security concerns and demographic pressure in border districts, reinforced at Bankura by reference to the arrest of a suspected Jaish-e-Mohammed operative in Purba Bardhaman. That is the government's stated position, and it deserves to be represented as such rather than dismissed. Whether the eventual bill text matches that framing, or drifts toward the kind of religion-specific classification the "land jihad" and "love jihad" narratives imply, is precisely what remains to be seen, and precisely what a close reading of the draft, once it exists, will need to test.

The demographic claim underlying both narratives deserves its own scrutiny, on the numbers rather than the rhetoric. The last official Census, in 2011, recorded Muslims at 27.01 percent of West Bengal's population, up from roughly 19.5 percent in 1951, a real shift, concentrated heavily in Murshidabad (66.27 percent), Malda (51.27 percent) and Uttar Dinajpur (approximately 49.9 percent). Between 2001 and 2011, the Muslim population grew at 21.8 percent against 10.8 percent for Hindus, a gap that has fed political narratives about unchecked change. But India has not conducted a Census since 2011.

Any figure claiming the Muslim share has since crossed 30 or 33 percent is an estimate or a political assertion, not verified government data. That distinction matters enormously when a government is preparing to legislate land ownership and religious conversion partly on the strength of a demographic argument that cannot currently be checked against an actual count.

None of this settles what West Bengal's conversion and land laws will ultimately say. What can be said now is narrower but still significant: one law is procedurally real and moving through institutional channels with a retired Supreme Court judge's imprimatur; two exist only as declared intent, wrapped in narratives with a documented history elsewhere and a demographic premise that outruns the available data. When the drafts do surface, the test will not be the Bankura speech, but whether the text can survive the same constitutional questions that have kept comparable laws in litigation in every state that has tried them before.